I love sports—playing, watching, you name it. But the sports experience has changed so much over the past few years, in new and exciting ways, which makes being a fan or being a player more dynamic – and way more fun.

Growing up playing basketball, we’d play the game, feed off our fans’ energy and cheers, celebrate when we won, and then challenge the next team!

But today, fans are tweeting messages to their favorite players and players are wearing sensors to track their performance—it’s a whole new ballgame. With the transitions we’ve seen in mobile, cloud and the Internet of Everything (IoE), so much has changed—and will continue to change—how we engage with our favorite teams.

I’d even venture to say that the fan-player relationship is now personal. You used to be able to only enjoy a game at the stadium where it was being played, or by listening to the radio or watching TV. You certainly couldn’t share your thoughts on the game with the players playing, except by screaming at them – or the TV.

Innovations in streaming video, live broadcasting and social media, have made today’s experience radically different. Wi-Fi-enabled sports arenas, combined with the huge expansion in mobile capabilities, mean that fans can watch the game live, watch on TV, or via an app on their smart device. Anyone out there like watching the hoop cam during a game?

This week, I’ll join my Cisco colleagues and industry peers at Strata + Hadoop World in San Jose. Participating in conferences such as this is one of my favorite parts of my job, because it gives us an opportunity as an industry to share information, learn from each other, and tackle challenges collectively with creative Data and Analytics solutions.

Cisco created an Analytics 3.0 architecture that enables data and analytics solutions in the Data Center, the Cloud, and at the network edge, and has made substantial investments in each of these areas as a company. As we have the opportunity to meet and collaborate at Strata + Hadoop World, the Cisco team can tell you all about our substantial investments in these areas. More importantly, you will hear about how Cisco is delivering solutions in partnership with innovative companies who are leaders in big data, analytics and business intelligence.

Speaking of innovative partnerships, today, I am excited to share the announcement of a joint Data Warehouse Optimization solution with Informatica. The solution provides a single platform for offloading processing and storage from data warehouses to Hadoop and enables organizations the ability to integrate and analyze more data and types of data. If you are attending the conference this week, I encourage you to visit the Cisco booth (#831) to hear more about this exciting new solution.

By bringing the best software, hardware and services from Cisco together with innovative and market leading capabilities of our partners, Cisco is enabling powerful solutions to the very real data problems our customers are facing. Data Virtualization is a key part of Analytics 3.0, because it allows you to connect multiple different data sources, make all the data appear as if it’s all in one spot, and serve it up with a consistent shape and format to an application and eventually to an end user. Take data from traditional data warehouses, Hadoop clusters, lots of edge places and make it all look to an application like its sitting in the data center in one central data base. This also saves application developers from re-writing applications to take advantage of data that lives at the edge. They can simply write applications as they always have and we can pull that data together wherever it lives – all across the network, in the cloud, and between clouds. Powerful on its own…even more powerful together with our partners.

Each week, we’ll highlight the most important Cisco Partner Ecosystem news and stories, as well as point you to important, Cisco-related partner content you may have missed along the way. Here’s what you might have missed this week:

In Part 1 of this blog series, I talked about how data integration provides a critical foundation for capturing actionable insights that generate improved outcomes. Now, in Part 2, I’ll focus on the two other challenges that must be met to extract value from data: 1) automating the collection of data, and 2) analyzing the data to effectively identify business-relevant, actionable insights. This is where things, data, processes, and people come together.

Let’s start with automation.

After IoT data is captured and integrated, organizations must get the data to the right place at the right time (and to the right people) so it can be analyzed. This includes automatically assessing the data to determine whether it needs to be moved to the “center” (a data center or the cloud) or analyzed where it is, at the “edge” of the network (“moving the analytics to the data”).

The edge of the network is essentially the place where data is captured. On the other hand, the “center” of the network refers to offsite locations such as the cloud and remote data centers — places where data is transmitted for offsite storage and processing, usually for traditional reporting purposes. The edge effectively could be anywhere, such as on a manufacturing plant floor, in a retail store, or on a moving vehicle.

In “edge computing,” therefore, applications, data, and services are pushed to the logical extremes of a network — away from the center — to enable analytics knowledge generation and immediate decision-making at the source of the data.

We all know that Big Data is getting bigger. And, the gap between the amount of data with hidden value and the amount of value that is actually extracted keeps widening. In fact, according to IDC, less than 1 percent of the world’s data is currently being analyzed. What good is data if it doesn’t produce actionable insights that generate improved outcomes?

A large portion of the world’s data is produced by the billions of connected objects that make up the Internet of Things (IoT), a critical enabler of the Internet of Everything. In Cisco Consulting Services, we recently conducted a blind global survey to learn more about how organizations are harnessing IoT to transform their businesses — and what they can do to drive more value. Read More »

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